Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning

ISBN-13: 9780521631815 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 328 str.

Daniel K. L. Chua; Ruth Solie; Jeffrey Kallberg

Opis

This book examines the intellectual history of instrumental music, in particular the idea of absolute music. It tries to show how certain ideas in philosophy, theology and the sciences affect the meaning and, indeed, the existence of instrumental music, and how, in turn, instrumental music is used to resolve or exemplify certain problems in modern culture. Instead of existing in a pure and autonomous form, music is woven back into the epistemological fabric and entangled with numerous discourses, thus demonstrating the centrality of music in the construction of meaning.

Recenzje

'… has been explored by other writers before Chua, but he gives it an extra twist by setting it in the larger and longer story of Western civilisation's 'disenchantment'.' BBC Music Magazine

Spis treści

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; On the preface; Part I. The Garden of Eden: 1. On history; 2. On modernity; 3. On disenchantment; 4. On division; 5. On opera; 6. On machines; 7. On space; 8. On style; Part II. The Fruit of Knowledge: 9. On being; 10. On the mind; 11. On biology; 12. On the body; 13. On the soul; 14. On morality; 15. On women; 16. On masculinity; 17. On independence; 18. On heroes; 19. On politics; 20. On nothing; 21. On God; 22. On infinity; 23. On self-deification; 24. On invisibility; 25. On conscious life-forms; 26. On artificiality; Part III. The Tower of Babel: 27. On death; 28. On absolute music; 29. On the beautiful and the sublime; 30. On monuments; 31. On the apocalypse; 32. On the end; 33. On suicide; 34. On absolute drivel; 35. On Babel; Bibliography; Index.